Come February, I will be 49: in the fiftieth year of my life. I’m not dreading anything at all about it. But I am pausing for thought. About where I am, what other lessons I'd like to teach myself, and how I want to enter my fifties. Maybe it’s ...

Whenever I watch an old movie with a train scene, I'm always on the lookout for a nun. Because the chances are good there's at least one on that train. I often wonder why this was so. Could it be that nuns were not permitted to move about by plane? ...